Month: April 2014

We live in a state of fabricated reality. But this itself should not be shocking. We are beings made of stories: before we are born, we are story, and once we are born, everything that came before us is story also. When we die we return to potential and imagination, and our lives will be described in stories only.

All history is but a story. In fact, all that you do not personally experience in the present moment is also pure story.

But what of the present moment? Is it the truth, the only truth? Well, the fact is that reality is explained to us by our senses, which interpret reality rather than letting us face it directly. The only direct experience of anything, I maintain, lies in our sense of potential. We truly sense potential like we see light, except we sense it directly, without a need for a sensory organ like an eye that mitigates our experience.

We call this direct sense of potential imagination. Consider it! When we imagine possibilities, we sense they are indeed possible in some way, under some circumstance. While some people might have a better range of imagination than others, there is no denying that all we imagine is possible IS possible. Really, anything can happen, because maybe there is really a Deity that can make it happen, or maybe there is really no strict laws of nature, so there’s room for the seemingly impossible. Even physicists have to concede that if the universe is infinite, or if there are infinite alternate universes, then everything we imagine can and DOES happen somewhere within it.

Meanwhile when we see something with our eyes we have to question, as Descartes did, whether our eyes and nerves and brain have interpreted the information correctly. That’s why we can easily be fooled by optical illusions. Also, we don’t know for sure that we are not in fact dreaming the “waking” world.

It is, in fact, possible that we are merely dreaming reality. It is possible that we dream the world into existence. We already know this is true. We come from imagination and dreams and stories. We return to stories when we die.

Of course, nothing is purely “real” or purely “false”. The same goes for absolutes like black and white. Nothing is pure white — surely some pixel, some spot, some dullness, some defect or some other attribute keeps it from being absolute white. It is the same with black! It is the same with all absolutes: truth or falseness, goodness or evil, joy or sadness, absolute zero (temperature) or infinite energy.

These absolutes exist in the same way that both light waves and photons exist at once. What is a wave and what is a particle?? They are physical absolutes. Particles, after all, are truly identical and interchangeable with each other — thus they have no defects or attributes that keep them from being an “absolute particle.”

Everything and nothing are also absolutes. Why does something exist instead of nothing, instead of everything?

I submit that absolutes do exist, however, in a way. I submit that the appearance of “something” is the interplay between everything and nothing existing simultaneously. The interplay of both particles and waves existing simultaneously creates the physical reality. The interplay of both zero-point energy and absolute zero energy existing simultaneously creates the active reality.

The interplay of both truth and falseness existing simultaneously creates our experience of stories. And I think this lies at the heart of the theory that the media fakes most of its big stories, like 9/11 or Sandy Hook. (See Simon Shack’s Cluesforum: http://www.cluesforum.info/ ) Not only is there some truth within the lies, but there are people spewing the lies who completely believe them, and thus, aren’t actually lying. Truth is really a funny thing, as evasive as absolute zero.

What we experience as reality is thus not entirely real (an absolute), but the interplay between realness and falseness. In some way we dream the world into being and in some way the world dreams us into being. Reality is a fabrication and a story that both we and it create.

How to begin my story? Let’s get acquainted first: I’m Morticia, a significant part of a whole person legally named Janice. You’ll see right there that I believe that there are more than one distinct personalities existing within this body’s brain.

Who we call “Janice” or “the Host” is the largest personality but she is really just a piece, not the whole collection of personalities legally named Janice. She’s not even several times bigger than me, and she’ll agree to that. I don’t fit into a hole inside her. If we were to merge somehow, we would join like the two pieces of Yin and Yang symbol. The whole symbol is itself a separate thing, a whole that has spaces for both the Yin and Yang.

We’ve been saying for years that we are “more than one person” and “a mass of contradictions.” This is because we both exist as near opposites, simultaneously, in a complementary duality.

“Janice the host” is gentle, girly, lesbian, married (common law), pagan, and humble.

We have always experienced each other and defined ourselves by knowledge of the other. I often (but not always) know what she is thinking. We have always communicated, even though we haven’t always recognized each other as clearly as we do now.

All the other parts fit into either one of us, or into a third big part, who is a blend of Janice and I — a particular shade of grey where our black-and-white selves have mixed. She’s lost the strong edges of Janice and I, so she doesn’t describe us completely. It’s the same as a child who doesn’t completely describe the DNA of its both parents, but a is blend in which some information (DNA) is lost. All the other parts are themselves smaller shades of grey, pixels if you will, that generally create in us three either a White, Black or Grey overall appearance.

In this way I believe that I am a multiple, that we are a multiple.

Yet surely the theme of complementary duality goes further. Surely there is a perspective in which we are singular, and a perspective in which we are multiple, just as an electron can be both particle and wave. My severe black-and-white thinking gets me into trouble sometimes, yet I imagine that extreme shades-of-grey thinking could also be problematic. You need the two kinds simultaneously. Not a half-assed blend of the two kinds of thinking, but both kinds in their full glory as simultaneously true opposites.

I like thinking in extremely abstract terms.Schrodinger’s Cat doesn’t bother me at all, being both alive and dead simultaneously. I believe Everything and Nothing exist simultaneously, giving the appearance of Something. A colour can at once be locked in a continuous spectrum or a separate entity unto itself. It all comes down to how you think about it; imagination is what creates everything in the end anyway; we dream the world into being and the real gods are stories.

So again: I am a multiple, but it’s because I’ve compartmentalized myself, which is why I have so many faces. But then, so has the universe. So I am in good company.

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From what little I remember of my childhood, I can see I was highly, highly dissociative. I think one of the reasons I’m so high-functioning now is that I was aware that I was missing time and in a fog, and gradually figured out how to adjust for that. I was classed as gifted in grade three, but school baffled me. I blacked out sometimes. I often said I had a headache and just put my head on my desk. Lessons that clearly were routine, like spelling tests done in groups of two, always seemed new and strange. I was out of it. I never read the books but scanned them for important information and wrote what was minimally required, with some spark of cleverness that would get me through the grades and keep me in special education for gifted children. I didn’t understand the world around me.

Five years ago, I would have put all this down to things like ADHD and autism spectrum disorder. But now I realize that there’s a reason I always feel like I’m waking up more and more, like I’m becoming more aware of the world around me and things are falling into place year by year. I was suffering from multiplicity and dissociation since early childhood.

My earliest childhood memories — which have been suggested by relatives to have occurred when I was just 1, but who knows — are of watching myself from a distance. Seeing myself on a chair, as if I’m behind myself. Seeing myself trying to navigate the bars and equipment of a hospital bed, again from an outside perspective. It’s strange.

I had odd nightmares of things beyond my comprehension at 6: people crucified to the sides of office buildings. Shadow people speaking to me, following me. My family being murdered. My school writing journals are a disaster — a 7/8 year old’s story of a shadow man coming into my bedroom at night. Drawings of him with blood dripping off him. Constant mentions of injuries and even concussions.

Several times my mother took me to school late, covered my ears in front of the teacher, and explained (I could still hear her) why I might act “strange” that day. Her stories weren’t always true.

I have clear memories of trying to run away many times, or begging my older sister to kill me. But I don’t remember why I was so upset. I was usually clueless and cheery, except for when I’d hide somewhere and punch myself in the head a few times, on a regular basis. My teachers remarked how well I was taking my parents’ divorce, how unconcerned I was at 9 when my mother moved away with another man.

After grade 5 and sex ed, I always assumed (without much reason except for self-exploration) that I never had a hymen. But the idea of vaginal penetration sounded too painful and terrifying to think about much.

Around puberty I became more and more self-aware, probably to keep myself out of trouble. I was hyper-vigilant. At 15, I suddenly became an outright mess. Whereas before I could win school debates and even take the starring role in the school musical, or audition for an improv comedy team, I very suddenly couldn’t look people in the eye or speak in class. I started to hide. Everything became about hiding and keeping quiet, low-profile, and not making mistakes. I wouldn’t take off my winter coat in class, to the point of getting fish scales all over it during a lab dissection. Teachers were generally kind to me but suggested that my coat made them nervous.

I hated myself for being so mentally foggy and tried to discipline myself in insane ways. I got rid of my bed and slept on a hardwood floor. I got very little sleep at night, getting up to study, and took (often unintended) naps during the day.

I had anorexia. I had wild philosophical ideas about life and the universe. I wouldn’t wear shorts or anything that showed any skin. I wouldn’t even drink for days. I started cutting myself. I wanted to die. I had a complete disinterest in boys, and barely convinced myself I was interested in girls either. There is so much more I could write. Times I got triggered up and didn’t know why.

I should mention that very few people paid any attention to any of this, and certainly not my parents.

So I thought I had just been born sick. Weird. Different. I had “perverted” thoughts. It didn’t matter that my biological father admitted to some limited child molestation, and was accused of much more. No hints I could remember mattered. Surely nothing had happened to me.

The denial stops here.

There were reasons, causes, and affects.

I remember now. And I am still remembering.

I’m not sick. I’m dissociative, but I’m regaining my life. And none of this was my fault.

Dr. Nina Burrowes has written and illustrated a beautiful story about five women recovering from sexual assault and abuse. It intends to show the part of the recovery process that often isn’t talked about — the long journey of little steps and lots of work. I found a lot to relate to here.

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I don’t know quite how to describe the healing work I’ve been doing, but generally it’s a great quest. Like most great quests it is all-consuming and involves challenges, difficulties, and victories. It is not something I dabble with; it’s my life for the time being.

The other day involved what I can only describe as a 6-hour flashback to a bad drug trip. It was messy and exquisitely horrible. But we (my parts and I) fought hard. We survived, and learned things, and feel stronger now, though still a bit wobbly.

What my partner and I do is stay open for therapy at any moment. It happens in the kitchen, in front of the tv, in the car, and even in the middle of grocery stores. Therapy can and does happen whenever it needs to. By therapy I mean asking questions, talking to parts, figuring out what’s going on in my head, and making things better. So we’re constantly striving to make things better for us.

In a way I like to see my parts the same way as my helping spirits in my shamanic practice. This is not to say that my parts are any less “real”, because I believe that helping spirits are completely real. My personalities offer different wisdom and knowledge and points of view, just as helping spirits do. I can call on them and develop relationships with them, just as with my helping spirits. In thinking this way, I’m honouring my parts and respecting them — which ultimately means honouring and respecting myself.

Sometimes I fear I am going to be stuck in my fears and difficulties forever, but I have to keep remembering the person I was four years ago, and even the person I was one year ago. Beautiful changes are happening, and beautiful healing takes place, and I can let it take all the time it needs.